Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Winning the Weekend

By now, I am sure you are familiar with my productivity challenge, but I wanted to throw in a few more examples on how you can leverage the concepts to your advantage, even when it seems difficult. One way you can bump it up a notch is by making a game out of your productivity.

Around our house, we use the phrase "Winning the Weekend" to describe getting our weekend tasks done early on Saturday (or better, Friday night). At its heart, the game is just an extension of the "Get Ahead" task, only we also place a premium on finishing those tasks earlier in the day. That timing lets us have the rest of the weekend back for ourselves. While the heart of the productivity challenge avoids carryover (you still max out at five a day, even if you only completed three yesterday), getting ahead lets you prioritize the tasks for the remaining days differently. You can start to choose more and more enjoyable items off of your backlog when the difficult or distasteful tasks got completed earlier.

During the week, you can use the same technique to maximize what you can get completed. Tackle your "must complete" tasks as early in the day as possible, leaving time for you later in the day to work on what you would like to. It's like the dessert at the end of dinner.

I'd love to hear how this works for you. Feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment and let me know if you have discovered any other tricks to your own productivity.